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Comment by kfriede | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious to see the success of this with Amazon Affiliates, since it is nearly a direct copy of a site I made 2 months ago (that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content). The site is https://fastandes.com (currently at limited functionality).

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This is not nearly a direct copy of your product. This one features a well designed UX that immediately engages and encourages further exploration. Yours made me bounce in 2 seconds.

Agreed entirely. Amazon search is better than this one.

A product can still be copied in functionality without being copied in design. The general premise (product recommendations from Reddit) is the same. I also agree my UX is bad. I have been meaning to pivot with all the data I already have but haven't gotten there yet.

Not complaining, competition is good. Just giving warning and bringing up discussion.

I searched for laptop (as suggested) and got webcams and other stuff, doesn't really seem curated at all?

The keyword searching was really bad, agreed. Akin to trying to search on Craigslist with ads having a giant list of keywords in them.

> that Amazon shut down due to lack of original content.

Not clear from your wording so asking.

Did you Amazon shut down your website, or did they close your affiliate account? What do you mean by 'lack of original content' ? Was the site an almost replica copy of the amazon page product details? or was it a copy of some other affiliate site?

Thank you!

Their wording is "lack of original content." Affiliates is geared towards bloggers who write posts (such as reviews) about linked products. Mine was nowhere close to that. Some sites skate by with alternatives, but I can see how I need to revise in order to comply with the program.

Edit: for example, http://hackernewsbooks.com/ is a site that has been successful with Affiliates. Amazon tends to be a bit moody with that program.

Thanks. You are right. The only difference I see between your site and the hackernewsbooks.com site is that the latter also links to a source, like the comment on HN thread that the book reference was scraped from...

That was on my to-do list for future features. I shipped it very early, and Amazon demonetized me pretty soon after that, so lots of things I wanted to do became useless.

Have you tried something like skimlinks/viglink? I think you could use either as a medium to amazon associates and still get paid.

I'm using skimlinks with my project and it seems to work pretty well, though it does take a while to get paid.

I'd looked into it as an expansion in the future. Currently my data set was built strictly on Amazon links, so expansion would mean a rebuild/reindex of all reddit posts.

The skimlinks JS code automatically rewrites any links within their affiliate system, including amazon. I only suggested it because you'd only need to copy/paste a few lines of code to rewrite everything.

our site was also rejected from amazon affiliate a couple times due to the same problem, eventually we changed the content and get passed, I wrote a medium post for that, https://medium.com/@guohuang/how-we-got-rejected-from-amazon...

so don't give up, just keep trying

I think I've mostly decided that with ThingsOnReddit's new found success, and my loss of interest in my project, I may throw in the towel on it. We'll see if I still feel the same in a few weeks to revamp it in a different manner.

there is a long way to go, i don't think "ThingsOnReddit" is a success yet, don't give up so easily, it is all about your determination.

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